The tiny island nation of Sri Lanka, located about 20 miles off the southern coast of India, rarely finds its way onto the front pages of newspapers or into contemporary novels and films. Most North American readers probably don’t even know that, until 2009, a quarter-century-long civil war raged there, caused by multiple religious and political divisions that even the Sri Lankans struggle to keep straight.

In her second novel, On Sal Mal Lane, the Sri Lanka-born Ru Freeman (2009’s A Disobedient Girl) seems single-handedly determined to write Sri Lanka into the world’s consciousness. Taking a page from the likes of Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children), Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone) and Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), she tries to illuminate a nation’s turbulent past and tenuous present by focusing on the lives of a group of ordinary people.

The result is only intermittently successful. There’s no mistaking the obvious affection Freeman has for her characters, most of whom live on a crooked lane in the capital city of Colombo, or her skill at capturing the rising tensions among them in the five years before war broke out in 1983.

There’s also no ignoring the fact that this novel is a slog, weighted down by too many incidents and decidedly uneconomical prose.

On Sal Mal Lane begins with the arrival of the Herath family on the racially and religiously mixed street of Sal Mal Lane. It is 1978, when resentment is building among the majority Sinhalese against the minority Tamils, who run the government. The Heraths are Sinhalese, albeit of a far more tolerant stripe than their next-door neighbors, the Silvas, who look upon the Tamils, as well as the burghers and Catholics on their street, with barely disguised contempt.

As the episodic story unfolds, Freeman maintains her tightest focus on the children of the families. She neatly captures the way young people are usually too caught up in their own worlds to make sense of the adult problems around them. Early in the novel, Mr. Herath, a midlevel government official, tries to explain the significance of current events to his two youngest children, Nihil and Devi: “Nihil glanced at his father. Devi, who had followed him into the room, also stood waiting for confirmation that all was well so they could get on with the business of playing.”

Where Freeman stumbles is in her plotting, or lack thereof: Alliances are formed and sometimes betrayed; the adults teach the children life lessons, and vice versa; Sonna, the unruly oldest boy of the Bolla family, is spurned by both his father and the other Sal Mal Lane children, in a manner that will come back to haunt them all. The sense of encroaching dread is palpable, but too obvious: Long before the book’s climax, we can predict which character is going to come to a tragic end and exactly how it’s going to happen.

It doesn’t help, either, that Freeman’s prose is fussy and cluttered. She seems to think if she puts enough words on the page, she’ll be able to disguise that what we’re reading is basically soap opera. To wit, a passage describing how the Herath children begin to rebel against their parents: “And growing up usually meant that good behavior, the kind of behavior expected by good parents who had raised their children properly, was destined to be shrugged off as personalities and tastes and a multitude of other characteristics, and their accompanying difficulties, were discovered.”

Yikes. That is an awfully roundabout way of saying, “Kids will be kids.”

If you know nothing of Sri Lanka, On Sal Mal Lane is a worthwhile place to start. (The book includes a seven-page glossary of Sri Lankan terms and a couple of artfully rendered maps.) Yet once the images of “rice and dhal and dried fish and sambal” and “pink and yellow flowers and leaves that drifted down from the Sal Mal trees” have faded, what lingers is a sense of misfired ambition. Ru Freeman clearly wants to write the Great Sri Lankan novel. This isn’t it.

Christopher Kelly is a writer at large for Texas Monthly and author of the novel A Push and a Shove.